It isn't what you meant, but is a result of
that kind of meaning. What we consider YAGNI
today are often exactly the features we need
to stay competitive. So you are right and
so am I.
What is fascinating is how very little the
Eric Raymond's of the web world actually
changed anything with regards to the dominance
of the players. Shirkey got it right with
his comment on the market having no incentive
to conserve cheap resources. What happens
is that once expensive resources become cheaper
in the computer industry in a way that nature
does not emulate. Evolution in nature works
on the basis of very long timescales.
Programmers and specification authors have two
very distinctly different jobs and their niches
are competitive with each other.
len
From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:]
On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 17:23, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> It's easy to conceive of why 80/20 dominates given
> incomplete or ambiguous requirements and such. Just
> remember that the alternative is to do all the work
> under one root, and in our world, that means a framework
> capable of subsuming all of the objects needed to
> paint that screen and keep updating it from data stores.
That's not really what I meant.
80/20 is fine except that we usually have no measurement to evaluate on
which side of the 80/20 frontier a feature is and 80/20 becomes just an
easy way to reject features we don't like.
Digression: for programmers an alternative to 80/20 is XP (extreme
programming). Unfortunately that doesn't seem easy to adapt for
specification authors.
